Solid State Drives (SSD)

[dman4x4]

Hi,

 I have a laptop with Win 7 Pro 64-bit full patched with the latest. I wanted to update my slow HD with new m4 256GB SSD. So, I backed my 100G C drive using Windows Create System Image applet.

  Swapped the drives then booted using the system recovery CD. Went to diskpart, did the following::

• select disk 0
• create partition align=1024 (also tried 4096)
• format fs=ntfs
• active
• assign

Then tried to do "System Image Recovery" which keeps giving me this error 0x80042412, details says that "no disk can be used for recovering the system...etc"

I tried removing all partitions and volumes on the SSD (using diskpart's clean command), but it gives a different error (0x80042403)

One thing I noticed in diskpart's (detail disk) command that the SSD one line that says (Boot Disk: No), is this normal? Not sure why I'm the only one getting this error.

Could you please help.

Cheers

[targetbsp · Accepted solution]

I've never used the Windows image thing.

You could try this: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Failing that I'll leave this thread for someone who has used it to answer.

[dman4x4]

Thanks a lot targetbsp, you have made my day. Guess what the guys at msdn forum said,,, Windows 7 does NOT support image restore to SSD!!

Can't believe MSFT is still making money with Windows.

More few questions:

• Not sure how macrium format my SSD (1024 vs 4096),  How can I find out?
• Which one is better? 1024 vs 4096
• Can convert from either without losing data?

[targetbsp]

As long as the alignment is divisible by 4k it doesn't matter what you use.

No, you can't easily change it afterwards.

[dman4x4]

Hmm, here is what diskpart report:

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary             99 GB    32 KB
  Partition 0    Extended            99 GB    99 GB
  Partition 2    Logical             99 GB    99 GB

DISKPART>

I have two partitions each one is 100G.....So first offset seems OK, but second one is hard to calculate .

Cheers,

Abdul

[targetbsp]

This will check for you: http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?download_id=9

Just choose each drive in turn and it will show green and say OK if it's fine or red and bad if not.

I'm afraid I don't know much about setting up multiple partitions, i always just use folders.

[dman4x4]

OK, here is more info from msinfo applet:

I got two partitions, here is the starting offset of each one:

Partition	Disk #0, Partition #0
Partition Size	100.00 GB (107,372,772,352 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset	32,768 bytes

Partition	Disk #0, Partition #1
Partition Size	100.00 GB (107,372,805,120 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset	107,372,805,120 bytes

Doing quick calculations:

First Partition Offset: 32,768 / 4096 = 8 (Looks fine)

Second Parition Offset: 107,372,805,120 / 4096 = 26214063.75 (Looks bad)

So, would increasing the size of the first partition fix the second partition offset?

Cheers,

Abdul

[dman4x4]

---

targetbsp wrote:

This will check for you: http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?download_id=9

Just choose each drive in turn and it will show green and say OK if it's fine or red and bad if not.

I'm afraid I don't know much about setting up multiple partitions, i always just use folders.

---

Thank you so much, I was looking for a tool like this

Cheers

[targetbsp]

Like I say, I've never played with that, but it makes sense!

[dman4x4]

Ok, it's getting interesting...

So, here is the Current Offsest for the second (bad) partition and then below I calcuated how it should start

 107,372,805,120.00 	 26,214,063.75 	Current (bad)

 (3,072.00)		

 107,372,802,048.00 	 26,214,063.00 	Planned (good)

So, by decreasing first partition 3,072 KB I should get second partition start the right place. That's the plan anyhow.

But, before I do this I thought let me do quick analysis of current performance of the two partitions (the good and the bad).

Good parition (Drive C):

Bad parition (Drive D):

On the read side not much difference. But the write side there is a big hit indeed. So, let me try "fix" this for dive D and will report back the results.

Cheers,

Abdul